Speaking about Torture by Carlson Julie A.;Weber Elisabeth; & Elisabeth Weber

Author:Carlson, Julie A.;Weber, Elisabeth; & Elisabeth Weber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

The Language of Feeling Made into a Weapon: Music as an Instrument of Torture

Christian Grüny

Anyone who first hears about music being used as an instrument of torture will probably react ambivalently: on the one hand, he or she will be surprised that such a sophisticated and ubiquitous cultural practice can indeed be used for torturing people; on the other hand, this will immediately coincide with certain everyday experiences—isn’t the hip-hop that the neighbors’ son keeps blasting through the house or, alternatively, the awful dissonances of contemporary music a form of torture? This attitude is reflected in the reaction of a member of the American Musicological Society to a resolution of his organization condemning the use of music as an instrument of torture: “American students now have a precedent to decry 20th-century music surveys—with their compulsory exposure to headache-inducing cacophony and traumatic collisions of sonic debris—as academic torture.”1

Apparently it is precisely these everyday experiences that lead most people to ridicule and trivialize reports on music torture. Blogs and commentaries are full of more or less aggressive reactions making fun of this phenomenon, and there are plenty of personal torture playlists containing names like Barry Manilow. The attitude behind all this seems to me to be the following: being annoyed by the neighbors’ listening habits or by being exposed to the band one hates most may be called torture in everyday conversation, but of course that’s not what it is. It may prevent sleep and work and cause aggression, but this certainly cannot be compared with a real torture victim’s anguish. Consequently, this attitude claims, it can’t be all that bad, and even if the euphemistic strategies of legitimation employed by the previous US government for practices like waterboarding are repulsive, to consider music as torture is clearly taking things too far.

When we turn to actual victims’ reports, the impression is altogether different. Binyam Mohamed and Ruhal Ahmed, whose statements have been widely quoted, were both subjected to a combination of different forms of torture, physical as well as psychological. Both maintain that they found it less difficult to deal with physical violence than with the use of music—they considered the former more predictable and consequently less disturbing. These strategies apparently did not work with music, and both victims talk about their fear of going insane. While the unbearable pain in physical torture is always also directed against the psyche, music seems to take a shortcut, directly attacking the victim’s sanity. Being subjected to this form of torture seems to amount to having to watch one’s mind fall apart.

My questions in this context are how this drastic encroachment works and what this means for the future of torture: what is it about music that has such an effect? To answer this question, I first describe the context and the situation of its use and then try to outline a conception of music that is consistent with both our everyday understanding and the possibility of its use as an instrument of torture.

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